Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Your new channel, for the win

You are more than the sum of your uploads, and so is your YouTube channel. Your channel is your brand and identity on YouTube. Your channel is where viewers who don’t know what you are all about go to learn more and where subscribers go to find what to watch next. Channels are the library where viewers can dig deeper and browse your full video archive.Over the last year, we have been evolving our product to make channels a central part of every YouTube visit. We tested the waters over a year ago by adding a subscription Guide to the homepage. This small change resulted in the number of new subscription per day doubling, so late last year we placed the Guide throughout the site and on our mobile apps. These changes have made channels ever more important and subscribers even more valuable. After all, with the Guide on every page, subscribers can see your channel every time they visit YouTube.But what happens when they click on your channel in the Guide? Today, viewers see a plain feed view of your channel instead of the branded version that you have curated. This is because today’s channels don’t incorporate the Guide. Soon, we will be rolling out a version of channels which will allow every click from the Guide to take the user directly to your channel. New channels will also give you more flexibility around how you organize your content, a more personalized experience for your visitors and, most importantly, a consistent experience across all platforms - TV, mobile, tablet and desktop. This will allow subscribers to access your channel page seamlessly, as you have designed it, from any page on YouTube on any app.What can you do now? Well for starters, we recommend holding off on re-skins or branding changes to your current channel. That time will be better spent building what you need for your new channel. We are excited to share the specs and start unveiling the product over the next few weeks.Stay tuned!AJ Crane, Product manager, recently watched Cats and Lasers with the GoPro Hero 2